Looking to improve your website or just getting started with creating one? Columnist Jordan Kasteler outlines his favorite tools that will help your website meet your marketing goals.

Owning and running an awesome website is usually as simple or as complicated as imagining what it will look like. Apart from determining the type of your website, you must operate it, overview website statistics and decide which tactics to use to increase traffic.

Fortunately for you, it’s not really complex, but it takes some hard work and the right tools. After that, you can try out different tools to make your work process more effective and productive.

You can’t get everything you need with one tool. It’s vital to check out various options like analytics, task management, work process automation and graphic design. The following are some of the most valuable tools for webmasters to help your brand grow.

1. SE Ranking

SE Ranking is an all-inclusive cloud-based SEO service that makes a website owner’s life easier, saves time on generating reports and helps in the preparation, analysis and adjusting of marketing tactics and development projects.

The service isn’t only for tracking website positions, but also for running your marketing campaigns of any complexity.

SE Ranking is a really useful and promising SEO tool for this generation of webmasters. Although it’s very new on the market, it works well in practice.

There are a bunch of great features like keyword suggestions, backlink monitoring, social management and website auditing. I haven’t noticed any bad things about SE Ranking, but for now I recommend you try it out and verify the validity of each listed feature.

2. Piktochart

Piktochart is my favorite online infographics creator for non-designers to create some basic designs. If you don’t have the time or budget to create a good infographic, you can use Piktochart to put together something awesome that you want to go viral quickly.

It’s hands-down the go-to tool for creating different charts, maps and videos, and it has an autosave feature in case you forget to save something.

The basic version is free but has a limited number of features. You can get the Pro version to unlock all features.

If you need to search for inspiration and ideas to create something unique, Piktochart is the very thing for you — it’s crammed with inspiration, and it’s easy to use and navigate.

3. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most powerful analytics services there is. It allows you to analyze your traffic, shows you demographic information (age, gender and more), and you can see who is visiting your website, including new or returning visitors.

You can not only find out the location of all visitors, but you can also get insight about the time they spend on your website. Such detailed demographic information helps define future content.

Google Analytics is a free web-based application that allows you to use it and view results anywhere with an internet connection. The charts are good-looking, and the provided results are quite accurate. And it helps with much more, like A/B testing and AdWords integration, which can improve your user experience.

4. Mention

Mention is a great web and social media monitoring tool. It has a user-friendly interface, and it’s easy to use.

The tool has a free plan that allows you track up to 500 mentions per month for your brand name. If you want to track more than 500 mentions, you can try out the Pro Plan that starts at $29 per month.

Mention is a really big time-saver for any webmaster, as you have the option to retweet mentions, like or share positive mentions on a Facebook page and send mentions via email. In comparison with other tools, Mention delivers alerts really quickly, and the ability to preview results on the screen is a great feature.

5. Work Examiner

Work Examiner is a perfect tool for webmasters in that it helps with running a large number of projects. Although some people might consider it to be kind of an intrusion into their privacy, it’s quite effective as a way to monitor employees’ daily duties and gather data on how they distribute their working hours.

You also can restrict employee access to some apps, programs or content that can distract their attention.

6. Ahrefs

Ahrefs has been one of my favorite link-building tools since I started my SEO career. The tool provides options for webmasters to analyze a link profile, let you know about the current link status of a website and help understand your content and your competitors.

In the Ahrefs suite, you will find Keyword Analysis, Batch Analysis, Site Explorer, Backlinks Report, Domain Comparison and Competition Analysis tools. Its fast and graphical performance makes it pretty easy to understand, even for SEO newbies.

7. SEMrush

SEMrush is a versatile SEO tool that’s designed for SEO experts and website owners to research relevant information for clients. The tool allows you to get the overall picture of a client’s field, find the best keywords, outrank competitors, check their website traffic, find out all site issues and more.

This is an all-inclusive SEO tool that offers a bunch of useful features that other tools won’t offer.

To tell the truth, SEMrush works better with the PRO account in order to get a well-detailed and complete analysis of your competitors’ websites. If you’re an SEO beginner, you can always start with a free trial to test out all the valuable features of SEMrush.

Conclusion

There are a considerable number of SEO tools for webmasters and internet marketers on the web. Whether you already own a bunch of websites, are in the process of creating one or have plans to start your next big project, you should get significant benefits from the above-mentioned seven tools.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

Jordan Kasteler is the SEO Director of Hennessey Consulting. His work experience ranges from co-founding BlueGlass Interactive, in-house SEO at Overstock.com, marketing strategy at PETA, and agency-level SEO & marketing. Jordan is also an international conference speaker, columnist, and book author of A to Z: Social Media Marketing.